Location? Like I'm three parts of a best part of a tidy way out? Really spoken by a south east coast fisherman chatting to his mum. On vhf. Classic!
I've heard a few "Station calling Solent Coastguard for a radio check, received loud and clear" which made me dubious!
The response is subjective. It is how the receiver hears the message, not you as you will have a different antenna and VHF set.
Very odd, Falmouth CG always moves the RNLI onto CH 0 once they have haled each other on CH 16, but you are correct the blithering idiot clearly has had a common sense bypass.
CG/RNLI were on CH 0 already. I'd heard the initial call on and transfer away from 16 but Blithering Idiot didn't.
Perhaps the CG should have insisted on a SEELONCE.
yerbut if he hadn't heard all the calls on 16 he won't hear that either. I think NCI may be the answer, until that gets too busy. Automated answering for test is the one, but who will pay?
I have a strong suspicion that many of the blithering idiots are not the type to join clubs or participate in education. NCI is well known amongst people who do care. It's them others such as the occasional charterer who decided it was perhaps a nice weekend so lets charter a yacht on the solent for the weekend and did that yachts 100th radio check of the year
They should all have been "educated" already in order to legally operate the radio, so it seems optimistic to expect more education to help
It is possible to switch on the radio, wait for the obligatory minute or so, and then initiate a call without being aware of a SEELONCE being in action, though preferably not for a radio check of course. I don't think it has ever happened to me, but innocent calls are possible, though my preference for DSC eliminates the risk.
i am new to sailing and i googled what channel to check if radio working and it clearly said 67 so i did and it worked and was fine so what channel do people actually test on as if someone goes out and does not test everything they putting their lives at risk i would have thought?
I would have thought that this sort of thing would have been covered in the radio course you did when seeking qualification, which you do have, I presume.
If you tested "everything" each time you went sailing, you'd never leave the mooring. For a VHF radio, the fact it switches on and the display correctly shows, there is now a 90% chance of it working, all that remains is the connection to the antenna. If it receives stations, I'd say you're now 95% sure it will work on transmit as well (statisticians please adjust with your own %). The problem is most radio checks are not checking much at all. I bet people don't set it to low power and call distant stations as a check, it'll be 25 watts to the nearest CG station less than a mile away which will prove little in the way of function in an emergency (ie distant contact in poor conditions be it heavy rain, an attenuator, or serious ducting like this weekend with the bands being swamped.